'When humanity exterminates species of other creatures, it is sawing off the limb on which it is sitting, destroying working parts of our own life-support system,' said biologist Paul Ehrlich.
"The ongoing sixth mass extinction may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilization, because it is irreversible. Thousands of populations of critically endangered vertebrate animal species have been lost in a century, indicating that the sixth mass extinction is human-caused and accelerating," the authors wrote in the study.
They found that 515 species of terrestrial vertebrates—1.7 percent of the species analyzed—met this criterion, indicating that they could disappear within the next two decades. The researchers also examined data on 77 mammal and bird species that have been on the brink of extinction in the last century, finding that around 94 percent of their localized populations had disappeared. Assuming that similar trends apply to all species on the brink, the authors estimate that 237,000 distinct populations of the 515 species they identified in the study have gone extinct since 1900.
Diverse ecosystems ranging from coral reefs to jungles depend on a complex web of long-evolved relationships between species to keep them healthy. But when key species are lost, the functioning of these ecosystems may suffer, degrading their ability to provide services that are important to humans, such as pollinating crops, or acting as defenses against natural disasters or disease.
One example of how an increase in human pressures on the biosphere can lead to devastating consequences is the wildlife trade. It's an ongoing threat to endangered species, as well as human health, given the propensity for diseases to"spill over" from animals to people.
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